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Updated: June 13, 2025
It was known that all that remained of the Southern armies would be there: of the armies that fought at Shiloh, and Bull Run, and Fort Republic; at Seven Pines, Gaines's Mill, and Cold Harbor; at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg; at Franklin, Atlanta, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga, Spottsylvania, the Wilderness, and Petersburg; and the whole South, Union as it is now and ready to fight the nation's battles, gathered to glorify Lee, the old commander, and to see and glorify the survivors of those and other bloody fields in which the volunteer soldiers of the South had held the world at bay, and added to the glorious history of their race.
The job was a great National one, and let none be slighted who bore an honorable part in it. And while those who have cleared the Great River may well be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely and well done than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of less note. Nor must Uncle Sam's web-feet be forgotten.
Along the western banks of the Antietam River, there runs, with a gradual rise of undulating ground, a crescent-shaped ridge, presenting its concave side to the river. The top of this ridge spreads out into a broad tableground of forests and ravines.
The woes of bereavement were not wide-spread; the killed at Manassas were hardly more than we read of now in a disaster at sea or a catastrophe in the mines. The whole army engaged hardly outnumbered the slaughtered at Antietam, Gettysburg, or Burnside's butchery at St. Mary's Hill. Hence the marvel of the instant fusion, the swift resolve of the Northern mind.
A few days after the battle of Antietam a prominent clergyman of Hagerstown spent the Sunday in camp, and McClellan invited a number of officers to attend religious services in the parlors of the house where headquarters were. The rooms were well filled, several civilians being also present.
The Third brigade of Smith's division marched hastily to the Maryland and Pennsylvania line, to where a stone bridge crossed the Antietam; a battery of artillery was also here, and the brigades and battery prepared to defend the crossing.
On the morning of the 17th we were yet ten miles from Sharpsburg, where Lee had drawn up his army around that little hamlet and along Antietam Creek, to meet the shock of battle that McClellan was preparing to give.
It is only a month since the whole army seemed tramping through the streets on its way to the field of the Antietam; only three weeks since the news was received that Lee was beaten back across the Potomac, and every one expected that McClellan would be hot on his trail, eager to pursue and punish before the daring Southerners could receive accessions.
He left cards for me at a half-dozen houses, and then I told him to order the driver to leave me at Rue du Roi de Rome, No. 12. Captain Merton's address. As I sat in the carriage and looked out at the exterior gaiety of the open-air life of Paris, my mind naturally turned in contrast to the war at home and the terrible death harvest of Antietam, news of which had lately reached Europe.
BURNSIDE, AMBROSE EVERETT. Born at Liberty, Indiana, May 23, 1824; captured Roanoke Island and Newbern, February-March, 1862; fought at Antietam, September 17, 1862; commanded Army of the Potomac, November 7, 1862-January 26, 1863; defeated at Fredericksburg, December, 1862; governor of Rhode Island, 1867-69; senator, 1875-81; died at Bristol, Rhode Island, September 13, 1881.
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